Help Us Get Our ME Awareness Film To Festivals

Aim: We've finished a groundbreaking ME awareness horror film - help us get it seen at film festivals!

Welcome To My Nightmare:

My name is Thom Jackson-Wood, and right now, I really need your help...again...

Back in 2021, Rebecca Holbourn and I campaigned to make an accessible version of our ME awareness short film, The Black Box: Awaken

It's taken us far longer than we planned, but the film is now finally done!

Now we need your help to get this film seen, by as many people as we can!

Here's why this is so important..

What Is ME?

I have a medical condition called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), which means "inflammation of the brain and the spinal cord" in Greek. In simple English, this means my spine and brain are on fire with pain -  which is exhausting. So exhausting. that I have chronic fatigue - which is not relieved by sleeping.

However, there are other symptoms that I deal with, including:

• Memory loss (for certain periods, known as "brain fog")
• Chronic Pain in my legs - which means I need a wheelchair to get around
• Bladder Incontinence - which means I have to wear nappies to stay dry.
• Chronic Anxiety - because at any given point, my body may give out on me.
• Frequent Migraines - which force me to lie down for hours at a time.

However, despite all of these health issues, my ME is considered moderate, compared to what other people with ME face. Much like Autism or MS, ME is a spectrum, where some people with the condition are affected by it worse than others.

People with Severe ME are so badly affected that they are bedbound, and they have to sleep most of the day. They are also more sensitive to light and sound.

More information about ME can be found at www.meaction.net.

Why Has It Taken So Long?

I understand. I share your frustration, on so many levels. Several factors have slowed us down:

• Filmmaking takes a lot of time and a lot of money, at the best of times.
• Indie filmmaking, without grant money, takes even longer, because you have to crowdfund each step of the journey.
• Indie filmmaking when you're living on fixed incomes, takes even longer still. 
• Indie filmmaking when you're living on fixed incomes, and chronically sick, and having to work around other people's 9-5 jobs...you get the idea.
• To sum up, this film has been not only constrained lack of money and lack of availability, but also lack of energy.

But It's Not All Been Bad News:

Thankfully the other reason it's taken this long is because I had other work - paid work. And that work meant I could cover most of the post-production costs myself. 

This meant I didn't have to run another Crowdfunder last year, and you got to see me on TV, in Finders Keepers (2024). 

My character Josh was non-verbal so I didn't say much. 

With this extra money, we were able to get in a really talented post-production team:

We've been really fortunate to work with some talented award-winning filmmakers in our post-production.

• Harry Crossman - Editor
• Nico Metten - Sound Designer
• Rupert Uzzell - Composer
• Simon P Leavesley - Colourist/Grader
• Anthony Baden Saggers - Music Department

Thanks to these talented people, we managed to make the Festival Cut of this film look much more polished than we planned. And it became more of a thriller - which helps to up the stakes.

The Challenges We Faced:

"I wanted to imagine visualise an invisible illness, in a confined space, all alone, in an engaging way." Rebecca Holbourn - Director

This was the challenge we set ourselves. And it was much harder than any of us imagined. This isn't a conventional film. Imagine a film with visuals by Derek Jarman, a script by Ken Loach, and directed by Jordan Peele.

That's a flex, but these are the filmmakers people have said when they've seen our rough cuts. And if it was going to take us this long to make, we may as well do a good job of it, instead of rushing it.

NOW we've finished the film, we want to take this to Film Festivals. 

Here's how we plan to do this:

Target 1: £500.00

• Firstly, we need to raise £500.00 to cover film festival submission fees.
  • We're aiming for BAFTA and BIFA-qualifying film festivals, and these aren't cheap.
  • For example, one submission to Aesthetica Film Festival in York, United Kingdom cost us £36.75. 
  • This is how much one festival charges to enter, so costs can rack up quickly.

Target 2: £500.00 + £1000.00

• Secondly, as a stretch goal, we'll aim to raise £1,000.00.
  • This is to cover travel and accommodation costs.
  • When you're disabled, things cost more, because the cheapest options aren't normally accessible. And my ME means I need to take days off to recharge - which means longer stays, and more money.
  • We're prioritising film festivals within the UK, Ireland and Western Europe, and preferring trains over planes, not just for carbon footprint reasons, but also because it's safer on my wheelchair.

Target 3: Further Amounts: Quiz Nights

• If we get more requests further afield, and we need to cover our own costs, we’ll run some quiz nights to fundraise further.
• We’ve done these before and we can show you some clips of how we made this journey.

Here’s what we’re up against:

• As we speak, disabled people’s livelihoods in the UK are under threat, again…
• If passed, the proposed welfare benefit reforms, which are being voted on today, 1st July 2025 will further hinder the most vulnerable people in society.
• The campaign groups Crips Against Cuts, Not Dead Yet, #TakingThePIP and Fight4Life.co.uk have been sounding the alarms of how badly these reforms will affect people.
• Things are so urgent, We are dropping a new clip from the film, live, before the campaign video is ready, in the hope that it will build some buzz.

There Is No Escape…

The Black Box: Awaken is a tale of how disability can strip you down and trap you, with no easy answers – so this film is very topical.

And it’s not an easy watch. We designed it that way, because that’s the truth as we’ve found it.

We made this film, in the hope that ME would be more relatable to people. But now, after the global Covid-19 pandemic, and the hundreds of thousands of people around the world affected by Long Covid, and now Austerity 2.0, more people are caught between the two evils of poverty and disability than ever.

And with YOUR help, we could get this story into some film festivals – so this can be seen by more people and reach a bigger audience.

Many thanks

Thom Jackson-Wood & Rebecca Holbourn

Life’s Green Pictures

The Black Box: Awaken (2025)

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 16th September 2025 at 4:27am